“The very, very obvious culprit here are music licenses, which are almost always the culprit behind missing SNL sketches,” reports AllThingsD.

In the course of seven minutes, Mars belts out pieces of songs from Katy Perry, Green Day, Aerosmith and Michael Jackson. And if the show doesn’t have the digital rights to a single piece of a single song, the whole thing goes black on the Web, legally speaking.

But NBC’s loss is Dan Abrams gain, notes ATD. A video aggregator called GossipCop, which is part of the Mediaite empire, is hosting the video with an option to embed. We imagine NBC hasn’t asked GossipCop to take it down yet because what better way to communicate to the music industry that its policies aren’t working than watching digital revenues get siphoned off by a legal analyst?